1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to checking and conditional processing of a print job printed with multiple transfer media.
2. Description of the Related Art
Print jobs sometimes require that the content be printed with different transfer media, such as toner, liquid ink, magnetic toner, etc. For instances, the bank account information on checks is often printed with Magnetic Ink Character Recognition (MICR) toner and the other content of a check, such as the graphical design, payee, amount and other information, is printed with toner or ink. For certain important documents, printing errors may prevent the processing of the financial transaction represented by the printed document, i.e., the return of the printed check. The document may be rejected for printing errors if the wrong transfer medium is used, such as if the wrong toner is loaded, i.e., magnetic toner is not loaded, or if there are mechanical problems with the print heads, imperfections in the print medium, etc. Printing errors in important financial documents may result in serious customer satisfaction problems and loss of business for the printer customer if the financial instrument is rejected due to a printing error.
One solution to the above print error problems is to print the entire document using MICR toner. However, this solution is costly because the MICR toner is typically more expensive than non-MICR toner. Another solution is to have a person manually verify the check content, which may substantially increase the time and cost to process the checks. Another solution is to perform “spot checks” of the printed checks by having a person review every Nth check to catch print errors that may be recurring in a batch run. This technique does not guarantee the quality of checks that are not reviewed.
For these reasons, there is a need in the art for improved techniques for print processing that can avoid errors when multiple types of transfer media are used for a print job.